
Class _ 
Book^ 



^ X' 



ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT 
AT THE LAYING OF THE CORNER. 
STONE OF THE OFFICE BUILDING OF 
THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 
SATURDAY, APRIL 14, 1906 



V"^ 



WASHINGTON 

GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 

1906 



F\ 



By transfer 

SEP \\ 1M5 



Over a century ago Washington laid 
the corner stone of the Capitol in what 
was then little more than a tract of 
wooded wilderness here beside the Poto- 
mac. We now find it necessary to pro- 
vide by great additional buildings for 
the business of the Government. This 
growth in the need for the housing of 



2 

the Government is but a proof and exam- 
ple of the way in which the nation has 
grown and the sphere of action of the 
National Government has grown. We 
now administer the affairs of a nation in 
which the extraordinary growth of popu- 
lation has been outstripped by the growth 
of wealth and the growth in complex 
interests. The material problems that 
face us to-day are not such as they were 
in Washington's time, but the underlying 
facts of human nature are the same now 



3 

as they were then. Under altered exter- 
nal form we war with the same tendencies 
toward evil that were evident in Wash- 
ington's time, and are helped by the same 
tendencies for good. It is about some of 
these that I wish to say a word to-day. 

In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress you 
may recall the description of the Man with 
the Muck-rake, the man who could look 
no way but downward, with the muck-rake 
in his hand; who was offered a celestial 
crown for his muck-rake, but who would 



4 
neither look up nor regard the crown he 

was offered, but continued to rake to him- 
self the filth of the floor. 

In Pilgrim's Progress the Man with 
the Muck-rake is set forth as the example 
of him whose vision is fixed on carnal 
instead of on spiritual things. Yet he 
also typifies the man who in this life con- 
sistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, 
and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness 
only on that which is vile and debasing. 
Now, it is very necessary that we should 



5 

not flinch from seeing what is vile and 

debasing. There is filth on the floor, and 
it must be scraped up with the muck- 
rake; and there are times and places where 
this service is the most needed of all the 
services that can be performed. But the 
man who never does anything else, who 
never thinks or speaks or writes, save of 
his feats with the muck-rake, speedily 
becomes, not a help to society, not an 
incitement to good, but one of the most 
potent forces for evil. 



6 

There are, in the body politic, eco- 
nomic and social, many and grave evils, 
and there is urgent necessity for the stern- 
est war upon them. There should be 
relentless exposure of and attack upon 
every evil man, whether politician or busi- 
ness man, every evil practice, whether in 
politics, in business, or in social life. I 
hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, 
every man who, on the platform, or in 
book, magazine, or newspaper, with merci- 
less severity makes such attack, provided 



7 
always that he in his turn remembers that 

the attack is of use only if it is absolutely 

truthful. The liar is no whit better than 

the thief, and if his mendacity takes the 

form of slander, he may be worse than 

most thieves. It puts a premium upon 

knavery untruthfully to attack an honest 

man, or even with hysterical exaggeration 

to assail a bad man with untruth. An 

epidemic of indiscriminate assault upon 

character does not good, but veiy great 

harm. The soul of every scoundrel is 



8 

gladdened whenever an honest man is 

assailed, or even when a scoundrel is un- 
truthfully assailed. 

Now, it is easy to twist out of shape 
what I have just said, easy to affect to 
misunderstand it, and, if it is slurred over 
in repetition, not difficult really to misun- 
derstand it. Some persons are sincerely 
incapable of understanding that to de- 
nounce mud slinging does not mean the 
indorsement of whitewashing; and both 
the interested individuals who need white- 



9 

washing, and those others who practice 

mud slinging, like to encourage such con- 
fusion of ideas. One of the chief counts 
against those who make indiscriminate 
assault upon men in business or men in 
public life, is that they invite a reaction 
which is sure to tell powerfully in favor of 
the unscrupulous scoundrel who really 
ought to be attacked, who ought to be ex- 
posed, who ought, if possible, to be put 
in the penitentiary. If Aristides is praised 
overmuch as just, people get tired of 



lO 

hearing it; and overcensure of the unjust 
finally and fi-om similar reasons results in 
their favor. 

Any excess is almost sure to invite a 
reaction; and, unfortunately, the reaction, 
instead of taking the form of punishment 
of those guilty of the excess, is very apt to 
take the form either of punishment of the 
unoffending or of giving immunity, and 
even strength, to offenders. The effort to 
make financial or political profit out of the 
destruction of character can only result 



II 

in public calamity. Gross and reckless 

assaults on character, whether on the 
stump or in newspaper, magazine, or 
book, create a morbid and vicious public 
sentiment, and at the same time act as a 
profound deterrent to able men of normal 
sensitiveness and tend to prevent them 
from entering the public service at any 
price. As an instance in point, I may 
mention that one serious difficulty encoun- 
tered in getting the right type of men to 
dig the Panama Canal is the certainty 



12 

that they will be exposed, both without, 
and, I am sorry to say, sometimes within. 
Congress, to utterly reckless assaults on 
their character and capacity. 

At the risk of repetition let me say 
again that my plea is, not for immunity 
to but for the most unsparing exposure of 
the politician who betrays his trust, of the 
big business men who makes or spends 
his fortune in illegitimate or corrupt ways. 
There should be a resolute effort to hunt 
every such man out of the position he has 



13 
disgraced. Expose the crime, and hunt 

down the criminal ; but remember that 
even in the case of crime, if it is attacked 
in sensational, lurid, and untruthful fash- 
ion, the attack may do more damage to 
the public mind than the crime itself It 
is because I feel that there should be no 
rest in the endless war against the forces 
of evil that I ask that the war be con- 
ducted with sanity as well as with resolu- 
tion. The men with the muck-rakes are 
often indispensable to the well-being of 



H 

society; but only if they know when to 

stop raking the muck, and to look upward 
to the celestial crown above them, to the 
crown of worthy endeavor. There are 
beautiful things above and round about 
them; and if they gradually grow to feel 
that the whole world is nothing but muck, 
their power of usefulness is gone. If the 
whole picture is painted black there re- 
mains no hue whereby to single out the 
rascals for distinction from their fellows. 
Such painting finally induces a kind of 



15 

moral color-blindness; and people affected 

by it come to the conclusion that no man 
is really black, and no man really white, 
but they are all gray. In other words, 
they neither believe in the truth of the 
attack, nor in the honesty of the man 
who is attacked ; they grow as suspicious 
of the accusation as of the offense; it 
becomes well-nigh hopeless to stir them 
either to wrath against wrongdoing or to 
enthusiasm for what is right ; and such a 
mental attitude in the public gives hope 



i6 

to every knave, and is the despair of 

honest men. 

To assail the great and admitted evils 
of our political and industrial life with such 
crude and sweeping generalizations as to 
include decent men in the general con- 
demnation means the searing of the pub- 
lic conscience. There results a general 
attitude either of cynical belief in and in- 
difference to public corruption or else of a 
distrustful inability to discriminate between 
the good and the bad. Either attitude is 



17 

fraught with untold damage to the country 

as a whole. The fool who has not sense 
to discriminate between what is good and 
what is bad is well-nigh as dangerous 
as the man who does discriminate and 
yet chooses the bad. There is nothing 
more distressing to every good patriot, to 
every good American, than the hard, scoff- 
ing spirit which treats the allegation of dis- 
honesty in a public man as a cause for 
laughter. Such laughter is worse than 
the crackling of thorns under a pot, for it 



i8 
denotes not merely the vacant mind, but 

the heart in which high emotions have been 

choked before they could grow to fruition. 

There is any amount of good in the 

world, and there never was a time when 

loftier and more disinterested work for the 

betterment of mankind was being done 

than now. The forces that tend for evil 

are great and terrible, but the forces of 

truth and love and courage and honesty 

and generosity and sympathy are also 

stronger than ever before. It is a foolish 



19 

and timid, no less than a wicked thing, to 

blink the fact that the forces of evil are 
strong, but it is even worse to fail to take 
into account the strength of the forces that 
tell for good. Hysterical sensationalism 
is the very poorest weapon wherewith to 
fight for lasting righteousness. The men 
who with stern sobriety and truth assail 
the many evils of our time, whether in the 
public press, or in magazines, or in books, 
are the leaders and allies of all engaged 
in the work for social and political better- 



20 

ment. But if they give good reason for 
distrust of what they say, if they chill the 
ardor of those who demand truth as a 
primary virtue, they thereby betray the 
good cause, and play into the hands of 
the very men against whom they are nom- 
inally at war. 

In his Ecclesiastical Polity that fine 
old Elizabethan divine, Bishop Hooker, 
wrote : 

''He that goeth about to persuade a 
multitude that they are not so well gov- 



21 

erned as they ought to be, shall never 
want attentive and favorable hearers ; be- 
cause they know the manifold defects 
whereunto every kind of regimen is sub- 
ject, but the secret lets and difficulties, 
which in public proceedings are innu- 
merable and inevitable, they have not or- 
dinarily the judgment to consider." 

This truth should be kept constantly 
in mind by every free people desiring to 
preserve the sanity and poise indispen- 
sable to the permanent success of self- 
government. Yet, on the other hand, it 
is vital not to permit this spirit of sanity 



22 

and self-command to degenerate into mere 
mental stagnation. Bad though a state of 
hysterical excitement is, and evil though 
the results are which come from the vio- 
lent oscillations such excitement invari- 
ably produces, yet a sodden acquiescence 
in evil is even worse. At this moment 
we are passing through a period of great 
unrest — social, political, and industrial 
unrest. It is of the utmost importance for 
our future that this should prove to be not 
the unrest of mere rebelliousness against 



23 
life, of mere dissatisfaction with the inevi- 
table inequality of conditions, but the un- 
rest of a resolute and eager ambition to 
secure the betterment of the individual 
and the nation. So far as this movement 
of agitation throughout the country takes 
the form of a fierce discontent with evil, 
of a determination to punish the authors 
of evil, whether in industry or politics, the 
feeling is to be heartily welcomed as a 
sign of healthy life. 

If, on the other hand, it turns into a 



24 

mere crusade of appetite against appetite, 
of a contest between the brutal greed of 
the "have-nots" and the brutal greed of 
the "haves," then it has no significance 
for good, but only for evil. If it seeks 
to establish a line of cleavage, not along 
the line which divides good men from 
bad, but along that other line, running 
at right angles thereto, which divides 
those who are well off from those who are 
less well off, then it will be fraught with 
immeasurable harm to the body politic. 



25 

We can no more and no less afford to 
condone evil in the man of capital than 
evil in the man of no capital. The wealthy 
man who exults because there is a failure 
of justice in the effort to bring some trust 
magnate to an account for his misdeeds 
is as bad as, and no worse than, the so- 
called labor leader who clamorously strives 
to excite a foul class feeling on behalf of 
some other labor leader who is implicated 
in murder. One attitude is as bad as the 
other, and no worse; in each case the 



26 

accused is entitled to exact justice; and in 
neither case is there need of action by 
others which can be construed into an 
expression of sympathy for crime. 

It is a prime necessity that if the 
present unrest is to result in permanent 
good the emotion shall be translated into 
action, and that the action shall be marked 
by honesty, sanity, and self-restraint. 
There is mighty little good in a mere 
spasm of reform. The reform that counts 
is that which comes through steady, con- 



27 

tinuous growth ; violent emotionalism 
leads to exhaustion. 

It is important to this people to grap- . 
pie with the problems connected with the 
amassing of enormous fortunes, and the 
use of those fortunes, both corporate and 
individual, in business. We should dis- ' 
criminate in the sharpest way between 
fortunes well-won and fortunes ill-won; 
between those gained as an incident to 

\ 

performing great services to the commu- 



nity as a whole, and those gained in evil 



\ 



28 

/ fashion by keeping just within the limits of 
mere law-honesty. Of course no amount 
of charity in spending such fortunes in 
any way compensates for misconduct in 

; making them. As a matter of personal 

i conviction, and without pretending to 

discuss the details or formulate the system, 

/ I feel that we shall ultimately have to con- 
sider the adoption of some such scheme as 

i 
I 

' that of a progressive tax on all fortunes, 

beyond a certain amount, either given in 

/life or devised or bequeathed upon death 



29 

to any individual — a tax so framed as to 
put it out of the power of the owner of 
one of these enormous fortunes to hand 
on more than a certain amount to any one 
individual; the tax, of course, to be im- ' 
posed by the National and not the State 
government. Such taxation should, of 
course, be aimed merely at the inherit- 
ance or transmission in their entirety of 

those fortunes swollen beyond all healthy 

c 

limits. 

Again, the National Government must 



30 

in some form exercise supervision over 

corporations engaged in interstate busi- 
ness — and all large corporations are en- 
gaged in interstate business — whether by 
license or otherwise, so as to permit us to 
deal with the far-reaching evils of over- 
capitalization. This year we are making 
a beginning in the direction of serious 
effort to settle some of these economic 
problems by the railway-rate legislation. 
Such legislation, if so framed, as I am 
sure it will be, as to secure definite and 



31 

tangible results, will amount to some- 
thing of itself; and it will amount to 
a great deal more in so far as it is 
taken as a first step in the direction of 
a policy of superintendence and control 
over corporate wealth engaged in inter- 
state commerce, this superintendence and 
control not to be exercised in a spirit of 
malevolence toward the men who have 
created the wealth, but with the firm pur- 
pose both to do justice to them and to see 



32 

that they in their turn do justice to the 
public at large. 

The first requisite in the public serv- 
ants who are to deal in this shape with 
corporations, whether as legislators or as 
executives, is honesty. This honesty can 
be no respecter of persons. There can be 
no such thing as unilateral honesty. The 
danger is not really from corrupt corpora- 
tions ; it springs from the corruption itself, 
whether exercised for or against corpora- 
tions. 



33 
The eighth commandment reads, 

''Thou shalt not steal." It does not read, 
''Thou shalt not steal from the rich man." 
It does not read, "Thou shalt not steal 
from the poor man." It reads simply 
and plainly, "Thou shalt not steal." No 
good whatever will come from that 
warped and mock morality which de- 
nounces the misdeeds of men of wealth 
and forgets the misdeeds practiced at their 
expense; which denounces bribery, but 
blinds itself to blackmail; which foams 



34 

with rage if a corporation secures favors 

by improper methods, and merely leers 
with hideous mirth if the corporation is 
itself wronged. The only public servant 
who can be trusted honestly to protect 
the rights of the public against the mis- 
deed of a corporation is that public man 
who will just as surely protect the corpo- 
ration itself from wrongful aggression. 
If a public man is willing to yield to pop- 
ular clamor and do wrong to the men of 
wealth or to rich corporations, it may be 



35 

set down as certain that if the opportunity- 
comes he will secretly and furtively do 
wrong to the public in the interest of a 
corporation. 

But, in addition to honesty, we need 
sanity. No honesty will make a public 
man useful if that man is timid or fool- 
ish, if he is a hot-headed zealot or an 
impracticable visionary. As we strive 
for reform we find that it is not at all 
merely the case of a long uphill pull. 
On the contrary, there is almost as much 



36 

of breeching work as of collar work ; to 

depend only on traces means that there 
will soon be a runaway and an upset 
The men of wealth who to-day are trying 
to prevent the regulation and control of 
their business in the interest of the pub- 
lic by the proper Goverment authorities 
will not succeed, in my judgment, in 
checking the progress of the movement. 
But if they did succeed they would find 
that they had sown the wind and would 
surely reap the whirlwind, for they would 



37 
ultimately provoke the violent excesses 

which accompany a reform coming by con- 
vulsion instead of by steady and natural 
growth. 

On the other hand, the wild preachers 
of unrest and discontent, the wild agita- 
tors against the entire existing order, the 
men who act crookedly, whether because 
of sinister design or from mere puzzle- 
headedness, the men who preach destruc- 
tion without proposing any substitute for 
what they intend to destroy, or who pro- 



38 

pose a substitute which would be far 

worse than the existing evils — all these 
men are the most dangerous opponents 
of real reform. If they get their way 
they will lead the people into a deeper 
pit than any into which they could fall 
under the present system. If they fail 
to get their way they will still do incal- 
culable harm by provoking the kind of 
reaction, which in its revolt against the 
senseless evil of their teaching, would 
enthrone more securely than ever the 



39 

very evils which their misguided followers 

believe they are attacking. 

More important than aught else is the 
development of the broadest sympathy of 
man for man. The welfare of the wage- 
worker, the welfare of the tiller of the soil, 
upon these depend the welfare of the entire 
country; their good is not to be sought in 
pulling down others; but their good must 
be the prime object of all our statesman- 
ship. 

Materially we must strive to secure a 



40 
broader economic opportunity for all men, 

so that each shall have a better chance 

to show the stuff of which he is made. 

Spiritually and ethically we must strive to 

bring about clean living and right thinking. 

We appreciate that the things of the body 

are important; but we appreciate also that 

the things of the soul are immeasurably 

more important. The foundation stone 

of national life is, and ever must be, the 

high individual character of the average 

citizen. 



LBJa^O? 



